Gloria Steinem fills crowd with HOPE for future of women's rights

GARDNER -- The House of Peace and Education welcomed writer and women's rights activist Gloria Steinem to its Celebrating Women event at Mount Wachusett Community College on Thursday night.

The event was held in honor of Marcelle Cormier and Paula Mulqueen, two local women who received HOPE's Award of Excellence for their contributions locally and abroad. Cormier was a teacher in Gardner for many years teaching literacy, and Mulqueen has done extensive medical work in Haiti.

Keynote speaker Steinem applauded HOPE for the work it does empowering women and children to become more than what they have been, and to break free from situations that enslave them, such as abusive relationships.

"It is clear that we can exactly predict the degree of violence in a society by the degree of violence in the home," Steinem said. "It is very clear that we can exactly predict the degree of the absence of democracy in society by the absence of democracy at home. If at home we learn deeply that it is OK for one group to cook and the other to eat, that it's OK for one group to clean and for the other to not, that it's OK for boys to get more education than girls, or it's OK for boys to have more freedom than girls in the outside world ... those are the things that normalize the idea of difference based on birth and cause us later on in life to accept class, and race and caste.

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Until she entered her 30s, Steinem said, she had bought into a belief that certain things were inevitable and that society had to be accepted as it was and nothing could be changed. The term domestic violence didn't exist, she said -- it was simply home life for many women whose husbands grew up in a society that equated masculinity with control, jealousy and possessiveness, and that often such attention was the only affirmation of their worth.

As other women began to speak out, through the civil-rights movement and ant-Vietnam War sentiment, Steinem said she realized an autonomous women's movement was necessary. The great realizations in her life, she said, come from stories such as those of the women being honored Thursday night, and from people daring to tell the truth, realizing they had more in common than they thought and that they were not alone in their experiences.

"We need to speak the truth," she said in regard to the current focus on women's reproductive rights. "If we've had an abortion, we need to say so. One in three women has had an abortion in her lifetime. If everybody told the truth, it would be a different atmosphere."

If women of all races were paid equal to men for what they already do, the poverty level in our country would be cut in half, Steinem said, and it would pump $200 billion more dollars into our economy.

Steinem speaks at many institutions of higher learning and said she always asks if there is a course that connects child rearing and public policy, and said she has yet to find one, because "academia is also genderized in a way that penalizes us."

That polarization, evident in so many aspects of life, also limits men, Steinem said, by depriving them of being expressive of what are considered to be more feminine qualities and often affects how they connect with their children.

Change can come, she said, but it's going to be a long process that can be slow, sometimes frustrating, and will come from where it is least expected.

"I think one of the great misconceptions, a very purposeful misconception, I would say, is that change starts from the top. It makes us feel powerless. But in fact, change, like a tree -- no tree ever grew from the top. And no major change ever came from the top. It is what each one of us does every day, and if we infuse our actions with what we care about, then we will have those values in the future.

"It is impossible to know which thing matters to us, which thing will matter to the world when we're doing it. So the trick of really making profound change is behaving as if everything we do matters."

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